Penguin Island — 07 Bk1 Ch7 - An Assembly in Paradise (Continuation and End)

VII.

AN ASSEMBLY IN PARADISE (_Continuation and End_) St. Catherine entered the assembly, her head encircled by a crown of emeralds, sapphires, and pearls, and she was clad in a robe of cloth of gold.

She carried at her side a blazing wheel, the image of the one whose fragments had struck her persecutors.

The Lord having invited her to speak, she expressed herself in these terms: “Lord, in order to solve the problem you deign to submit to me I shall not study the habits of animals in general nor those of birds in particular.

I shall only remark to the doctors, confessors, and pontiffs gathered in this assembly that the separation between man and animal is not complete since there are monsters who proceed from both.

Such are chimeras—half nymphs and half serpents; such are the three Gorgons and the Capripeds; such are the Scyllas and the Sirens who sing in the sea.

These have a woman’s breast and a fish’s tail.

Such also are the Centaurs, men down to the waist and the remainder horses.

They are a noble race of monsters.

One of them, as you know, was able, guided by the light of reason alone, to direct his steps towards eternal blessedness, and you sometimes see his heroic bosom prancing on the clouds.

Chiron, the Centaur, deserved for his works on the earth to share the abode of the blessed; he it was who gave Achilles his education; and that young hero, when he left the Centaur’s hands, lived for two years, dressed as a young girl, among the daughters of King Lycomedes.

He shared their games and their bed without allowing any suspicion to arise that he was not a young virgin like them.

Chiron, who taught him such good morals, is, with the Emperor Trajan, the only righteous man who obtained celestial glory by following the law of nature.

And yet he was but half human.

“I think I have proved by this example that, to reach eternal blessedness, it is enough to possess some parts of humanity, always on the condition that they are noble.

And what Chiron, the Centaur, could obtain without having been regenerated by baptism, would not the penguins deserve too, if they became half penguins and half men?

That is why, Lord, I entreat you to give old Maël’s penguins a human head and breast so that they can praise you worthily.

And grant them also an immortal soul—but one of small size.”

Thus Catherine spoke, and the fathers, doctors, confessors, and pontiffs heard her with a murmur of approbation.

But St. Anthony, the Hermit, arose and stretching two red and knotty arms towards the Most High: “Do not so, O Lord God,” he cried, “in the name of your holy Paraclete, do not so!”

He spoke with such vehemence that his long white beard shook on his chin like the empty nose-bag of a hungry horse.

“Lord, do not so.

Birds with human heads exist already.

St. Catherine has told us nothing new.”

“The imagination groups and compares; it never creates,” replied St. Catherine drily.

“They exist already,” continued St. Antony, who would listen to nothing.

“They are called harpies, and they are the most obscene animals in creation.

One day as I was having supper in the desert with the Abbot St. Paul, I placed the table outside my cabin under an old sycamore tree.

The harpies came and sat in its branches; they deafened us with their shrill cries and cast their excrement over all our food.

The clamour of the monsters prevented me from listening to the teaching of the Abbot St. Paul, and we ate birds’ dung with our bread and lettuces.

Lord, it is impossible to believe that harpies could give thee worthy praise.

“Truly in my temptations I have seen many hybrid beings, not only women-serpents and women-fishes, but beings still more confusedly formed such as men whose bodies were made out of a pot, a bell, a clock, a cupboard full of food and crockery, or even out of a house with doors and windows through which people engaged in their domestic tasks could be seen.

Eternity would not suffice were I to describe all the monsters that assailed me in my solitude, from whales rigged like ships to a shower of red insects which changed the water of my fountain into blood.

But none were as disgusting as the harpies whose offal polluted the leaves of my sycamore.”

“Harpies,” observed Lactantius, “are female Monsters with birds’ bodies.

They have a woman’s head and breast.

Their forwardness, their shamelessness, and their obscenity proceed from their female nature as the poet Virgil demonstrated in his ‘Æneid.’ They share the curse of Eve.”

“Let us not speak of the curse of Eve,” said the Lord.

“The second Eve has redeemed the first.”

Paul Orosius, the author of a universal history that Bossuet was to imitate in later years, arose and prayed to the Lord: “Lord, hear my prayer and Anthony’s. Do not make any more monsters like the Centaurs, Sirens, and Fauns, whom the Greeks, those collectors of fables, loved.

You will derive no satisfaction from them.

Those species of monsters have pagan inclinations and their double nature does not dispose them to purity of morals.”

The bland Lactantius replied in these terms: “He who has just spoken is assuredly the best historian in Paradise, for Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Cornelius Nepos, Suetonius, Manetho, Diodorus Siculus, Dion Cassius, and Lampridius are deprived of the sight of God, and Tacitus suffers in hell the torments that are reserved for blasphemers.

But Paul Orosius does not know heaven as well as he knows the earth, for he does not seem to bear in mind that the angels, who proceed from man and bird, are purity itself.”

“We are wandering,” said the Eternal.

“What have we to do with all those centaurs, harpies, and angels?

We have to deal with penguins.”

“You have spoken to the point, Lord,” said the chief of the fifty doctors, who, during their mortal life had been confounded by the Virgin of Alexandria, “and I dare express the opinion that, in order to put an end to the scandal by which heaven is now stirred, old Maël’s penguins should, as St. Catherine who confounded us has proposed, be given half of a human body with an eternal soul proportioned to that half.”

At this speech there arose in the assembly a great noise of private conversations and disputes of the doctors.

The Greek fathers argued with the Latins concerning the substance, nature, and dimensions of the soul that should be given to the penguins.

“Confessors and pontiffs,” exclaimed the Lord, “do not imitate the conclaves and synods of the earth.

And do not bring into the Church Triumphant those violences that trouble the Church Militant.

For it is but too true that in all the councils held under the inspiration of my spirit, in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa, fathers have torn the beards and scratched the eyes of other fathers.

Nevertheless they were infallible, for I was with them.”

Order being restored, old Hermas arose and slowly uttered these words: “I will praise you, Lord, for that you caused my mother, Saphira, to be born amidst your people, in the days when the dew of heaven refreshed the earth which was in travail with its Saviour.

And will praise you, Lord, for having granted to me to see with my mortal eyes the Apostles of your divine Son.

And I will speak in this illustrious assembly because you have willed that truth should proceed out of the mouths of the humble, and I will say: ‘Change these penguins to men.

It is the only determination conformable to your justice and your mercy.’”

Several doctors asked permission to speak, others began to do so.

No one listened, and all the confessors were tumultuously shaking their palms and their crowns.

The Lord, by a gesture of his right hand, appeased the quarrels of his elect.

“Let us not deliberate any longer,” said he.

“The opinion broached by gentle old Hermas is the only one conformable to my eternal designs.

These birds will be changed into men.

I foresee in this several disadvantages.

Many of those men will commit sins they would not have committed as penguins.

Truly their fate through this change will be far less enviable than if they had been without this baptism and this incorporation into the family of Abraham.

But my foreknowledge must not encroach upon their free will.

“In order not to impair human liberty, I will be ignorant of what I know, I will thicken upon my eyes the veils I have pierced, and in my blind clearsightedness I will let myself be surprised by what I have foreseen.”

And immediately calling the archangel Raphael: “Go and find the holy Maël,” said he to him; “inform him of his mistake and tell him, armed with my Name, to change these penguins into men.”